The Variable Body in History
- Submitting institution
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University of Winchester
- Unit of assessment
- 34 - Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management
- Output identifier
- 34CM2
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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10.3726/978-1-78707-100-1
- Publisher
- Peter Lang UK
- ISBN
- 9781906165727
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Variable Body in History is the second collection of essays in the three presented in this REF cycle and derived directly from Chris Mounsey’s VariAbilities conference series. The essays were chosen to explore the different ways the body has been experienced in history and interpreted by historians of culture, from the medieval to the modern period. Challenging the negative perceptions that the term ‘disability’ suggests, the essays together are intended to present a mosaic of literary representations of bodies and accounts of real lives lived in their particularity and peculiarity. The book does not attempt to be exhaustive, but rather it celebrates the fact that it is not. By presenting a group of individual cases from different periods in history, the collection demonstrates that any overarching way of describing bodies, or unifying description of the experience of the myriad ways of being in a body, is reductive and unhelpful. The variAbility of each body in its context is the collection’s subject.
Chris Mounsey’s essay ‘Aphra Behn’s Blind Lady: Reading Impairment and Impairing Reading’ argues that Aphra Behn, writing during the Restoration, was able to combine an understanding of the impaired body as a lived experience, with a political metaphor: Varronian satire. The combination, the essay argues, set off Behn’s career as a playwright in her attack on the Whig Robert Howard’s play The Blind Lady (1670), in her satire The Unfortunate Bride: or, the Blind Lady a Beauty that was not published until after Howard’s death in 1698. The earlier writing date skews the chronology of Behn’s writing and thus the essay radically alters the accepted understanding of Behn’s career in the theatre.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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